1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to media playback and more specifically to adapting media playback to different devices as a user changes location.
2. Introduction
Media content has become accessible to many people in many places on many different devices. Mobile content consumption has become especially prevalent as mobile devices grow more powerful and capable of outputting not only songs and pictures, but movies and television shows. As users take these mobile devices through different environments such as different rooms in a house or an office, each environment has a potential plethora of devices capable of rendering media content but which are unused or are displaying competing media. Often these devices are already networked or capable of being networked with very little effort via DLNA, UPnP, or similar protocols. Such devices include televisions, amplifiers, media storage devices, digital photo frames, personal computers, speaker systems, cellular phones, appliances, etc. Any device capable of emitting sound or graphical output may be used to output media in some form or another.
The problem is that users change environments and change devices with no continuity between the media they are enjoying. A user is listening to a favorite song in the car from an iPod®, another not so favorite song on the garage radio as the user exits the car in the garage, sees a few moments of an unrelated television show in the front room as the user walks in the house, and sees a picture on the laptop screensaver in the bedroom. The cacophony of unsynchronized media devices is not unified and is often distracting.
Another problem is that users miss portions of a movie or other media presentation when they must temporarily leave in the middle. A typical movie is 90 to 120 minutes long, during which many people leave to purchase popcorn, go to the restroom, etc., and may miss out on a critical plot element or an exciting action scene. Epic movie collections such as Lord of the Rings or Star Wars are long enough by themselves, but are sometimes shown back to back making uninterrupted viewing even more difficult. Viewers sometimes have little control over when they must exit, so they cannot time their absence for a less important segment of the movie.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an approach to drive multiple devices in unison and give each device instructions on how to render a particular piece of media content a user is consuming to provide a complete experience that follows the user between environments and devices.